A user named shaddamiv posted something simaler to my post. "ME and ME2 work reliably with vesion 8.15.10.2361 any new driver (8.15.10.2559 +)" so is it possible to get a lower version if thats even possible?

I tried the older .2361 drivers which let me get past the instant "crash to desktop on opening the menu". I thought I was home-free but then the game crashed again during the introductory level when I tried rebinding Jacob's power in the quickbar from one key to a different one.

UPDATE: However, I haven't had any trouble with the game since that, besides some minor graphical glitches.

I was having the same crash to desktop error when opening the pause menu, but reverting to the .2631 drivers fixed it! Thanks a bunch! I was really tearing my hair out for a while there. Hopefully the next update will fix the problem, since there is notacable decrease in video quality on my other games with the older drivers...

I must say that using these drivers does cause a noticeable (as in statistically significant) performance drop in some other games, namely Far Cry 2. I have used Far Cry 2's excellent benchmarking tools and my average FPS dropped from 29 to 25 after going from the newest drivers to .2631.

As for the hopes that Intel might do a regression back to the old drivers, I find that unlikely. The drivers we are using now for Mass Effect 2 are really old by now and a lot of energy must have been invested in fixing other important stuff in the newer versions. However, there is still hope that some bugfix in the future might resolve this issue (if it is the driver's fault and not Mass Effect's, that is).

Here's hoping that Mass Effect 3 is prepared and tuned for the Intel HD 3000s. :-)

The Intel engineering department is aware of this thread and they are currently working to get this issue resolved. I still do not have an estimate time of resolution but you can keep checking this post for updates

I've updated my 2631 drivers to 2622. All drivers between versions 2622 and 2631 caused the crashes on hitting the ESC key, but as of driver 2622, ME 1 and 2 have been running very nicely on my machine. I have no idea whether ME3 works as well, maybe someone who has access to the game could try it?

This is a MacBook Air with an i7, running Windows 7 /64bit in BootCamp.